Last week PhilPapers, “a comprehensive index and bibliography of philosophy maintained by the community of philosophers,” sent letters to academic librarians asking for financial support to sustain their work. As a recipient of such a letter, I would like to invite philosophers, librarians, and others interested in volunteer-run digital projects like PhilPapers to talk about issues raised by the organization’s call for support.  Among other topics, we can consider such questions as what is the value of such a service for scholars? for graduate students? for undergraduates?  Is asking for subscriptions from libraries the most appropriate method for supporting resources like PhilPapers?  Should libraries regularly factor funding for such services into collections budgets and how should libraries prioritize such funding with traditional journal and database subscriptions?  All are welcome to bring their opinions and their questions to the table.

If you are unfamiliar with PhilPapers or their call for subscriptions, here are a few links to more information:

Check out PhilPapers here: philpapers.org/

See PhilPapers public notice calling for institutional subscriptions here: philpapers.org/post/8146

For an overview of the response from librarians see this post from Wayne Bivens-Tatum, philosophy librarian at Princeton University: blogs.princeton.edu/librarian/2014/04/a-last-bit-on-philpapers/

I propose a hybrid Talk-Make session focused on the creative and effective uses of social media platforms in the classroom. The humanities share a core knowledge structure that is both narrative and dialectical; therefore students of the humanities can benefit from experiential understanding of these structures. As some of us know (depending on our level of engagement), social media platforms engage and enable this same style of dialogue. Most students, however, engage with social media in a comparatively “shallow” manner—focusing more on people than knowledge. I’d like to explore the ways that we, as educators, researchers, and knowledge-makers, can help our students use what they know to discover what they have yet to know. As they do so, I believe they become active participants in new ways of meaning-making.  

Talk

For the Talk portion, I would like to share briefly a project my students did this semester that utilized Storify <www.storify.com> to bring together digital information in a narrative format. I believe the framework of the project has applications across multiple disciplines. The Storify format allowed students to engage course materials with outside materials, placing them in dialogue with others while asserting their own voices. Along the way, we also utilized Twitter as part of the larger classroom landscape, which served as a springboard for ideas, a platform for discussion, and interactive gateway to the outside world. On every level, these technologies enhanced student involvement in the classroom, student learning, and – that thing every instructor seeks to achieve – student desire to pursue more learning. I’ll bring copies of the assignment and post a link to it and some student projects on our website prior to the conference.

Make

For the Make portion, I want participants to

1. Bring ideas, questions, and desired outcomes for classroom social media projects in the works;
2. Share any successful projects they have developed;
3. Leave with finished (or fleshed-out) products and a variety of useful materials from colleagues.

Some Platforms I am interested in hearing more about: Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, Vine, and Google+. I hope participants will add others.

Preparation & Follow-Up
I encourage participants to arrive pre-registered with a Google account for the use of joint Google docs; be prepared to collaborate and share. Bring your work on a flash drive and be prepared to Make! (Listening contributors are welcome, too!)

I’d like to create a centralized location online for continued collaboration on these, and future, digital/educational projects. We can discuss the best platform for this location in the session. One of our THATCamp coordinators has offered UF’s Digital Humanities Project Showplace <cms.uflib.ufl.edu/DigitalHumanities/UFDigitalHumanitiesProjects&gt; as one viable option.

In this talk session, I propose a look at design in DH projects. Matthew Kirschenbaum suggests in “‘So the Colors Cover the Wires’: Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability,” “just as interface cannot – finally – be decoupled from functionality, neither can aesthetics be decoupled from interface.” This “lesson here for the digital humanities” seems to point to the critical roles design and beauty play in the production and use of DH projects.  Kirschenbaum concludes his article with a glance to the future: “One of the major challenges for the digital humanities in the coming decade will therefore be designing for interfaces (and designing interfaces themselves) outside of the 13- to 21-inch comfort zone of the desktop box.”  With this challenge in mind, I would like for us to consider the following questions:

1. How do we talk about design in DH?

2. How do we teach design in DH?

3. How do we do design in DH?

In addition, I’d like for us to look at a number of interfaces for DH projects to critically reflect on design as it influences how we approach and use the various projects.  Participants will be invited to work in small groups to analyze interfaces and then share their conversations with the whole group.  From these shared discussions, we will strive together to make visible how design and aesthetics work to direct attention, guide action, and affect emotion.  The conclusions that arise will hopefully point to new opportunities and challenges related to the development, composition, and display of DH projects and scholarship.

In rendering its judgment in the case of Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, the court was persuaded by arguments raised in the “digital humanities” amicus brief. The court expressly stated that the transformative uses of the digitized content, as highlighted in the brief, was the very definition of fair use. This endorsement of fair use in transformative digitization projects informs the articulation of strategies or best practices to employ when building new digital humanities projects. During this session, we will talk about some well-accepted fair use strategies and best practices for digital humanities projects — and maybe articulate some new ones!

When I began my own research project as a second-year undergraduate, I set out to map the world of Dante’s Commedia through the use of GIS software. However, I eventually left that project behind and pivoted into a more traditional topic and goal. Although I am pleased with how my undergraduate thesis turned out, I would like to talk about undergraduates and projects in digital humanities. As the bar continues to be raised for undergraduate research projects, I wonder how digital skills can enhance and shape future work. This discussion will likely yield more questions than I can predict—here are some of my own to get us started:

• What types of results do instructors consider digital humanities projects?
• What kinds of traditional disciplines and courses lend themselves to these projects?
• What type of skill set would students need in order to do these projects?
• What resources and support can ensure the success of undergraduate work in the digital humanities?
• How early is too early to get started?

Despite focusing this proposal on the undergraduate experience, I think the questions I have outlined could also be extended to other levels of students and instructors themselves.

How can GoogleEarth maps be used to the best effect in digital archive projects? Amy Giroux and I would like to continue the discussion on the use of digital mapping as a conversational feature in interactive digital archives. We have each employed GE map overlays to enhance our archive projects, employing the layering properties and tour feature with the intent of generating comments and feedback from site visitors, as well as providing visual guide points for historic processes (i.e., population and demographic changes over time, land use changes, etc.).

We are interested in hearing what others have experienced, and in exploring the opportunities and limits of this technology as a generative feature in interactive archives.

This conversation will explore the concept of translatability that includes, but is not limited to, traditional language translation. As a starting point, we’ll take it as axiomatic that translation exists in every transfer of information (whether analog or digital) and that we can learn (and teach) a lot by engaging in and becoming conscious of this process. Essentially, we will try to come up with generative and creative approaches to translation in digital humanities, whether in the classroom or in our own research projects.

Discussion points may include the following:

• analog to digital translation
• human gesture, composition, and motion capture technologies
• multimodal translation (visual, sound, silence)
• visual languages in digital humanities
• crowd-sourcing translations
• cross-platform virtualization and binary translation

So often in discussions about open access to scholarship, there is an implication that OA is for STEM, and that the products of humanities scholarship are fundamentally different somehow and therefore not appropriate for openness. I want to explore this (mis?)perception in a talk session about openness in the humanities. I’m most interested in the perspectives of practicing humanists, but also in the experiences of other librarians who’ve struggled to convince their humanities faculty to get their work out from behind the paywall. My goal isn’t to change anyone’s mind, but rather to have a fruitful discussion in a collaborative environment about the challenges humanists perceive from the OA movement, and brainstorm ways in which we (librarians and scholarly communications staff) can make scholarly communication programs work for humanities scholars.

Feel free to tweet at me if you have any suggestions for the session @joshbolick

Gainesville THATCampers have proposed sessions on creating digital archives, making exhibitions for those archives, and learning TEI editing for documents within said archives. These promise to be excellent sessions and I hope they all make the cut. With that said, I’m sure many of us are hands-on learners who would benefit from a session in which we further apply our newly learned skills about digital archives with (hopefully) the benefit of some more-experienced individuals on-hand to help us think through the technical steps as well as any ethical, legal, and aesthetic issues that might arise.

Here’s what I propose: I’ll make myself a guinea pig and offer up my still-in-beginning-stages Digital Archive of the Birth Control Review (a little magazine run by Margaret Sanger from 1917-1929) for experimentation, critique, and play. By looking at an archive that is in the early stages of development – and designed by a neophyte – rather than one that is polished and exemplary, this session will provide a useful counterpart to those proposed by Patricia Carlton, Mark Kamrath, and Lourdes Santamaria-Wheeler.

I will begin the session by briefly introducing the archive, mentioning some of the questions and pitfalls I faced in getting the archive to this stage, and explaining the concerns I have going forward. Then, depending on the interests of the group, we could break into smaller groups to discuss/work on/play with discrete topics such as digital archive design (what works and what doesn’t about this particular archive) or TEI editing one of the magazine’s issues.

Full disclosure: I am not an expert in digital archives, coding, or preservation techniques. Yet I think my lack of knowledge is actually an asset here. In talking through the steps that led me to begin the Archive of the Birth Control Review, and getting feedback on the site from experts and novices alike, my hope is that non-tech-savvy individuals such as myself will gain inspiration for and insight into the process of starting up a digital archive.

The Archive of the Birth Control Review can be found at birthcontrolreview.omeka.net/. This archive aims to make the periodical more accessible by housing a searchable index of all issues (no comprehensive index currently exists), as well as guided collections of articles from the magazine on topics such as eugenics, race, suffrage, and WWI.

Magic Mirror Theater is an open-source web application designed to facilitate the study of classical drama and potentially other forms of literature by enhancing the current teaching methodologies in higher education, using an experiential-learning augmented-reality environment. It allows instructors and students to use their classroom projector or personal computer screen as a “magic mirror” in which they can see themselves standing on the stage of an ancient theater digitized in life size, holding digital replicas of ancient props, wearing digital costumes, and interacting with virtual mechanical devices used during theatrical performance in the Greco-Roman world.  A library of 3D objects thematically categorized will be available along with options for selecting theatrical space, perspective, replicating user’s body on the stage in various arrangements (chorus/main actors), and other features. This system aims to help students and future scholars understand the circumstances of performance and comprehend the architectural and spatiotemporal logistics of Classical Drama.